Mandela, MLK & Obama

I think we can all agree that when major world leaders die, we all die a little bit ourselves. In my case, I generally come down with a terminal case of boredom because the media bombards us with tributes from people who labor under the delusion that a little bit of glory rubs off on them if they utter the requisite number of laudatory clichés.

In Mandela’s case, he was apparently as good and bad as any figure of our time. Nobody can deny that he was exactly what his nation needed – a leader who not only didn’t seek revenge on those who had kept him in prison for 27 years, but who had handed over the presidency after a few short years when every other African leader hangs on for as long as he can, generally murdering countless thousands in order to do so.

On the other hand, when it came to matters outside the borders of South Africa, he was a left wing, anti-American, anti-Semitic, creep who buddied up to the loathsome likes of Gaddafi, Castro, the Russians, Yasser Arafat, and the Palestinians, sounding exactly like the Ayatollah when it came to Israel.

At his send-off held in South Africa’s major soccer stadium, we and the rest of the world got to see Obama meet and greet Raul Castro, behaving as if he had just run into a long-lost chum. Once again, I got to see him bend to shake Castro’s hand, just as he had with all those world leaders in 2009. The fact is he’s 6’1, tall but not gigantic; I have a great many friends who are that tall or taller, and even though I’m only 5’7 when I stand on my tiptoes, none of my pals has to bend over to shake hands. Whether Obama thinks the slouch emphasizes his height or, God forbid, hopes to fool people into thinking he’s humble, I don’t know. But it’s a very annoying affectation and I wish he’d cut it out.

Although I believe that Mandela’s virtues outweigh his sins, I’m not sure I feel the same way about Martin Luther King. The major difference between these two communists is that Mandela was a politician; he was in a position to turn his moral convictions into reality. King, on the other hand, was simply a reverend, a moral authority, if you will, but as a serial adulterer, I have to question how much actual authority he had or deserved. What’s more, unlike Mandela, who did so much to rid his nation of apartheid, the relations between blacks and whites in America not only haven’t improved since the late 60s, they have become far worse, although Obama and those other reverends, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have to take much of the blame for that.

Although he generally gets to slide because he was only a writer and not a dictator, Karl Marx deserves his place on any list of major villains because it was his writing that made it possible for the very worst despots – Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez – to put a good face on pure evil. All they had to do was give away some freebies to the mob in the name of fairness and equality, and before the mob knew what was happening, they were under someone’s boot. And because the mob, whether here or in Russia or Cambodia, is as collectively stupid as a sack of rocks, they will swallow bilge from anyone who promises to take away goodies from others and give it to them.

In case you don’t know a mob when you see it, if it chants slogans, it’s a mob. Mobs always chant, generally while marching in a circle with their right fists thrust in the air, while parroting some jackass screaming inanities into a bullhorn.

According to political pundit George Will, people who oppose the treaty that Obama and Kerry are trying to make with Iran are nostalgic for the 1930s. By that, I take him to mean that things were terrible back in the days when the Soviet Union was isolated and only the New York Times and Pravda had good things to say about the Bolsheviks, and when Stalin’s agents hadn’t yet had a chance to infiltrate our State Department. For my own part, I’m nostalgic for the 1990s when George Will wrote about baseball, a topic about which he seemed to know a little something.

Finally, someone should explain the meaning of “hypocrisy” to Ed Henry, Fox’s man at the White House. While reporting that Harry Reid had exempted his staff from ObamaCare, he went on to say that there were some Republicans who were being equally hypocritical because he’d heard that a few GOP senators were considering exempting their own staffs. If Mr. Henry sees no difference between the guy who had done the heavy lifting to get the toxic bill passed, and those on the other side of the aisle who voted against it and have been trying to kill it for the past four years, it may be time for Fox to get him away from Jay Carney’s influence before his brain also turns into mulch.

Burt Prelutsky, who lives in the San Fernando Valley with his wife Yvonne and dog Angel, has a long and distinguished writing career that includes newspapers, magazines, and TV. He is also the author of “Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco,” “Liberals: America’s Termites” and, recently, “Barack Obama, You’re Fired!” and a collection of interviews, “67 Conservatives You Should Meet Before You Die,” which includes the likes of Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich, Gary Sinise, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Michael Medved, Joseph Wambaugh, John Bolton, Lee Greenwood, Charles Krauthammer, Phyllis Shlafly, David Limbaugh, Bernard Goldberg, and the three Pats: Boone, Sajak, and Robertson.